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by Goladus 5741 days ago
There are existing businesses who bet on Solaris and have it widely deployed. Moving to Linux may not be trivial. That is, it may not be beyond the FYO point. [1]

The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire, but there are a lot of businesses that rely on it and IBM still gets paid to support mainframes.

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2004/08/28/the-economics-of-soft...
1 comments
rbanffy 5740 days ago
> The IBM AS400 isn't something that people really desire

I liked OS/400, you insensitive clod. If I come across a 5250, I'll buy it immediately.

Not sure what I'll connect it to.

But, going back to Solaris and OpenSolaris, it's easy to switch a deployment to "legacy mode". Unix machines are Unix machines and it's not nearly as difficult to move from AIX/HP-UX/Solaris/IRIX to Linux as it would be to move from MVS, unless your binaries insist on running only under Solaris. Legacy mode means no new deployments and no expansion unless justified. It's slow death.

True, in the case of very proprietary platforms (like z and iSeries boxes) it takes very long, but it's death nevertheless.

In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.

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Goladus 5740 days ago
I'm sure that moving off iSeries, etc. is a much more significant proposition than moving off of Solaris. But the barrier isn't zero. For an installation of any significant size it's almost certainly not going to be as simple as switching a deployment to legacy mode. You've got shell scripts to port, different configurations for core features like kickstart, firewalls, different package management. If you made an "environment standardization" bet on Solaris 10, you've got barriers to overcome.

But I'm not saying that Solaris is going to live. Just that, as someone who uses Solaris 10, Oracle seems to be tightening up. I think that they don't really care that much about Solaris and are just going to squeeze it dry. I'm far more worried what they're going to do with Java.

> In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.

True, but keep in mind that their competitors are often limited to "enterprise" distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu Server.

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